LinBits 68: Weekly Linux Phone news / media roundup (week 42/43)

Yet Another week in Linux Phones: Kernel progress for the Librem 5, UNISOC and old Tegra SoCs, Plasma Mobile Dev builds with Modem Manager; Nemo Mobile progress videos, Matrix news, new releases of Numberstation, phoc and DanctNIX and more! Commentary in italics.

Software releases

phoc, the compositor component of Phosh has seen another release, go read the release notes. Lots of bug fixes, and, I quote: This release changes the way application IDs are reported for GTK3 applications. If you're using scale-to-fit, you may need to adjust your configuration._
Numberstation, Martijn Braam's excellent OTP client, now allows to import and export data to make moving your OTP needs between devices much easier.
Manjaro have started publishing Plasma Mobile ModemManager Dev builds. The fact that these are seperate builds from the usual dev builds should give you an idea about their level of maturity.
DanctNIX Arch Linux ARM has seen another release on October 22nd. IMHO, the big new feature here is the new mesa-git variant, which seems to improve performance in my testing (no benchmarks, just judging from my in use experience.

Worth reading

Good Kernel News

TuxPhones: More support for UNISOC and Spreadtrum chips lands in the Linux kernel. While it's too early to say how big this effort is and how long it's going to continue, it's good to see some progress here.
Purism: Purism and Linux 5.14 and Linux 5.15. Truly great progress. Also, from what I saw from just having a glance at source.puri.sm, libcamera might land rather soon.
Phoronix: Linux Continues To Improve Power Management For Older NVIDIA Tegra SoCs To Avoid Overheating
xnux.eu log: Pinephone HDMI hot-plug-detection HW bug fixed. I bet a lot of people are now asking "5.15 wen?" in distro chat rooms.

PinePhone Pro multi boot

xnux.eu log: Pinephone Pro – levinboot payload selection. Multi boot landing - and being helpful for further kernel development!

Userland Software progress

This Week in GNOME: #15 Sepia and App Updates. Great to read about Fractal's progress!
Carl Schwan: This week in NeoChat.
Claudio Cambra: Some big usability improvements and fixes, fixes, fixes — Kalendar devlog 20. Beta soon!
Carl Schwan: Spellchecking with QML
Phoronix: PipeWire 0.3.39 Brings Libcamera Plugin Improvements, Better Compatibility For JACK Apps.
Phoronix: Alternative Python Implementation "Pyston" Plans For Greater Performance, 64-bit ARM. Just including it as it might help with Python app performance.

App recommendations

Gamey: PINEPHONE: Matrix clients on Linux Phones!. Great post by Gamey! BTW, if you want to use Hydrogen as a web app on Phosh, just install it in GNOME Web (Epiphany) as a web app. While that's generally not super fast, performance is good enough with Hydrogen.

Cool features

Liliputing: Virtual mouse app for Linux phones makes desktop apps easier to use. Great post about an impressive project, make sure to watch the video (also linked below)!

PinePhone Pro Posts

BoilingSteam: Pinephone Pro: Finally, A Tangible Alternative.

Making of the PinePhone Pro introduction video

Vincent the Cat on PINE64: How „Meet the PinePhone Pro“ was made. Great read!

Now for something completely different: VR and Matrix

Liliputing: Unlocked Oculus Go software released, making the VR headset hacker-friendly. I am really looking forward to what people are going to come up with!
element blog: Element One - all of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place. Make sure to not get carried away by enthusiasm and read through the current caveats of this, but it's still great news for Linux Phones if you ask me! See also: Beeper.

Worth watching

Real PinePhone Pro videos

Martijn Braam: Phosh on the PinePhone Pro. Looking good!

Nemo Mobile Progress

Jozef Mlich: Booting NemoMobile on PinePhone. Nice animation!
Сергей Чуплыгин: Nemomobile device lock work. Useful!
Сергей Чуплыгин: Glacier UX: mouse support.

Using Desktop Software on Phones

CalcProgrammer1: Touchpad Emulator Update - Automatic Rotation, Keyboard Toggle, Demo with External Monitor. This is really impressive, especially that touchpad feature!

Software Defined Radio experiments

cemaxecuter: DragonPhone w/ Headless Suscli Server + KerberosSDR w/ Wireless SigDigger Client Setup (PinePhone).

PinePhone for remote working?

richieeee72: Hybrid working using PinePhone, dock and VNC Connect. This is quite interesting, and it works quite okay!

Sxmo Talk

Tech Over Tea: Let's Run DWM on A Pinephone | Nephitejnf.

Matrix news

Matrixdotorg: Matrix Live S06E45 — FractalNext. If you care about Matrix, this is one to watch!

PinePhone Reviews

My Linux Diary: Pinephone Review after a month and a half.

PinePhone "Review" "Reviews"

Twinntech: Pinephone honest review #2. Sorry everybody for causing this ... video by comment (please take note of the hashtag).

Ubuntu corner

UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 111. Another great Q&A, with Dalton, Alfred and Florian. They discuss new apps, OTA 20, Ayatana indicators landing in 20.04, and lots of interesting community questions!
Neil Patel: Ubuntu Touch for OnePlus 5T Initial Thoughts [Blog].

Tablet fun

Niccolò Ve: Challenge: Use KDE Plasma ONLY With Touchscreen!. While it actually seems challenging, I feel that a video like this one might help moving things forward.

Shorts

cemaxecuter: DragonPhone M17 Decoded by SDR++ on the PinePhone w/ RTLSDR.
JingOS: Kodi works perfect on JingPad A1 and JingOS ARM!.
CCF_100: 🤔 (Neverball on PinePhone).

Stuff I did

Content

None :(

Random

I tried to get into Memes.
I was kindly invited to join another podcast for one episode. More on this once the episode is out!

LINMOBapps

Activity has continued on the low level it reached last week. I've added one app:

Phosh Antispam, a program that monitors Gnome calls and automatically hangs up depending on the user's preferences. Extremely useful if spam callers bug you. Once more great work by kop316!

Read here what (else) happened on LINMOBapps this week. And please do contribute!

Linux Phone Apps

Nothing, sadly.

LINux on MOBile